How to build an Ethereum mining equipment

This guide is going to showcase you how to build an Ethereum Mining equipment yourself which has two main steps – choosing and sourcing your equipment and then putting it together! Depending on times its most likely going to take you a week or so to get all the chunks and then another half a day fiddling with configurations etc. Its the same spil building your own laptop normally but with a few toegevoegd considerations that mainly involve which GPU’s you pick.

If you don’t want to buy mining equipment, You can also attempt buying a cloud mining contract with Hashflare or Genesis Mining.

Your going to have to get hold of a fair few components and the costs stack up fairly quickly:

1) A MotherBoard – A motherboard is the brain of the laptop and is what you build everything onto – the base of your mining equipment. The main feature you are looking for ter a motherboard is the number of GPU slots it has spil this will determine how many graphics cards or GPU’s it can getraind – and te the end your total hashing power. Trio PCI Express slots will mean you can gezond Three x Radeon HD 7950 with a hashrate of 20 MH/s each – or a total hashing power of 60 MH/s. A PCI Express slot is a connection port on the motherboard and looks like the picture below – they are often coloured white but can be beige – you can get other types of slots but most GPU’s work on a PCI express.

Wij used the GA-Z97X-Gaming Trio which you can get here! Two) Graphics Card – Pick your GPUs! Some graphics cards cost a fortune but don’t hash much whilst some are more reasonable but use more power. Ultimately its a balance inbetween how powerful you want your equipment to be and how much you want to spend – but a word to the wise – make sure you pick an efficient GPU. You can buy 2nd arm GPU’s from reputable providers such spil GPU Shack – be careful tho’ when you buy them off a street corner spil often they have problems that you won’t see until you get the card huis and plugged te.

Wij have a list of GPU’s here that you can sort through and work out what fits your budget.

Another punt you can have with your graphics cards and your motherboard is that they just won’t all gezond te together nicely because of the spacing on the motherboard inbetween the PCI Express slots. Fear not – you can use a GPU riser that is basically an extension cable for a PCI Express slot. Some graphics cards are indeed fairly bulky so be careful when you are making your selection. You can get a riser here.

Trio) Hard Drive – You need a hard drive to store your operating system and your software for mining. A standard SSD drive will do (an SSD hard drive is just a storage device and is called solid state spil there aren’t moving onaardig which can pauze). The size will depend on what you are programma to do when mining. If you are programma to download the entire blockchain and mine spil shown te this guide here – then you will need to take into account how big the blockchain will become and need to spend a little more. If you are just going to mine ethereum spil part of a pool then you don’t need to store the blockchain and can get a smaller SSD drive. Wij used the SSDNow V300 120GB. Buy it here. Four) RAM – or Random Access Memory – this is a basic component te any rekentuig is basically a scratchpad for jotting down calculations and recalling information quickly ter a rekentuig. 4GB should do the job.

You can get some here. Five. APSU or Power Supply Unit – Power supply units come ter many sizes and this can journey some people up when they are looking at calculating what size they need. You need to sum up the power consumption of your GPU and all the other components and make sure your power supply has the capability to supply more! So if you have two GPU’s that consumes 220 Watts and other components that need 250 Watts then you can get away with a 750 Watt power supply unit spil the total power needed is only 690Watts.

If you are building a “mega equipment” which has 6 GPU’s you might find it more cost effective to have two separate power supplies because at 750 Watts and $100 each rather than a 1500 W and $300 dollars!Wij got a Seasonic 1200 Watt which you can buy here. 6) A Case – Again this can be fairly a difficult choice to make spil it will depend on your GPU’s and whether you are using GPU risers. You don’t want components sitting on top of each other spil there is a fire hazard potentially. You can leave the entire system open air or even build your own case to give it that personalised touch. You can buy off the shelf equipments from a duo of providers – for example SW mining here have their own set of equipments that take up to a week to ship. They do all the hard work for you.

Alternatively you can source some of you components from gpuShack , on our 2nd mining equipment wij are using the MOBO/CPU/RAM/SSD Bundle for Five GPUs. Reminisce to use the promo code CRYPTOCOMPARE gets 5% discount off your purchase.

Spil mentioned make sure your power supply unit can treat the Graphics cards and that you have risers capable of placing reserve GPU’s te a safe location. Make sure all the connections are ter nicely and everything is held together rigidly.

A word on positioning. GPU’s can get hot – especially if you overclock them so be sure to get the best vreesachtig for your buck – and to be safe to place your equipment te a well ventilated area so it doesn’t overheat.

Once it switches on you need to make sure all the software is there for you to get it mining!

The very first thing you need to do is install an operating system on your laptop. For the more technically minded there is linux Ubuntu but for the majority Windows is most likely best spil it automates installing drivers for your laptop to talk correctly amongst all the components. The advantage of Ubuntu is it gives you more options and its free!

You can donwload EthOs which is a specifically designed APP for Ethereum Mining – you can read more about this here but its a excellent way of having a bespoke mining system for your equipments and GPU’s to manage them!

Once you have installed the operating system there are two ways you can mine:

Solo Mining – Solo mining means its you against the surplus. If your hash is onberispelijk you win the block prize. But with a equipment of 60 MH/s and a network hashing power of 1.Two GH you aren’t going to get ether very often. The other punt is you have to download the blockchain for yourself. See our guide here on how to solo mine ethereum.

Pool Mining – This is where you team up with other miners to reduce the volatility of your comes back. This means whether you get Five ethere every Five days or 1 ether every day. The advantage of this is you get a continuous stream of ether and you don’t have to download the entire blockchain. Check out our guide on how to mine ethereum spil part of a pool here.

If there are any questions on how to get your equipment up and running – or any part of the process – just druppel us a line at the bottom of the article – our resident mining guru will help you out. You can also postbode ter our Ether Forum and one of our community should be able to help you out! Also if wij’ve got something wrong or it can be explained better let us know!